Animate Your Words: Create An Animated Typeface

1. Introduction: thank you for joining me today. My name is Mike Martin. I'm a motion designer and co creator of motion addicts dot com. I use motion addicts to experiments in after effects in cinema 40 to create motion graphics chips. A lot of the work I like to create is pretty abstract, but you can create a lot of feeling. And just through animation and design, this class is made for beginner users as I go through a step by step process on how to animate with Shea players. But current users of after effects should be able to learn a few workflow tips to be able to streamline their pipelines. I'm going to show you how to create an animated typeface from scratch just by breaking it down letter by letter, so let's get started. 2. Creating an Animated Banner for your Blog: Hey, everybody. So today we're gonna be creating an animated typeface from scratch. I'm just using some shape layers and some tools out of built in after effects, as well as some tools that I like to use to keep things organized from a e scripts dot com . And the particles that you see are gonna be done using trapped code particular. And that is 1/3 party plug in for aftereffects. I know not everybody is gonna have it. So that section of the course is actually optional. You can use this type to create a cool, uh, just header for your blawg. I went ahead and created this an example for motion addicts, but also my name here for my portfolio riel. And I think that that it works pretty cool on import site and just adds a little bit of flavor, especially if you're a motion designer. You can immediately show somebody your skill, said as soon as they answer your site. So I think that's pretty cool. So a lot of this type of animation is actually inspired by an tomography dot net. They've got all sorts of preset animations that they made that you can download for after effects. You can kind of go through here and hover over each one and Fat Franks a pretty good example of something similar to what we're about to do. So let's go ahead and get started. 3. Project Settings & Font Selection: in this lesson, we're going to be creating our basic project settings as well as choosing which font that we want to use for our banner and why the font choices important. So let's go ahead and jump in after effects. Once you have this window up, you can select our project panel here and hit the creative new composition. This will pull up our composition settings. Uh, right now, let's go ahead and set it up for 1920 by 10 80. That is full HD. We want our frame rate to be 24 frames per second, and the duration of five seconds is fine. If you want to change this, we can go ahead. Let's let's make it seven seconds just so we can have a little bit of time. All you have to do is type in 700 you can see here that it changes it to the time code and that should be good to you. So once we have our composition setting set up, actually, we forgot to name it. So go ahead and hit control que that will reopen our composition settings and let's go ahead and name. This are animated banner and the head. OK, now we have a composition set up. If we want to create a new text layer, let's go ahead and select the type tool here. Just click anywhere in the camp and let's go ahead and type are name of our blawg. My my blog's name is motion addicts. So do then all caps, then hit Enter on the num pad times New Roman is definitely not gonna work for me. So I'm going todo ahead and choose. I went with din. If you know what following the true looking forward, Just go ahead and take that in there. I have the pro versions here and I chose the condensed, bold version of it. Let's go ahead and scale it up. And uh, that 200 The reason why I chose this foreign. It's because obviously I like the amount of weight that the font has, since it is bold that we we can add in our additional strokes to get the more detailed animations. But I also like how tall it is. I chose to go ahead and enemy vertically first, so all of my letters were going to come in with a single line and then they'll kind of reveal themselves from there. And that was just That was just a choice that I made toe make a theme for the animation. Obviously, depending on what fart you choose, you condone a little bit more fun with it. Like if I had more blocky letters, then maybe I would reveal I was like a shape first, like we'll say, like a big triangle for the A, and then it just kind of pops into place with the rest of the character. I think that's really important, just kind of nailed down, which font that you want to choose and ah, and then go from there. So the easiest, the easiest way toes set this interval Ogg. Obviously, it's not centered right here. So if you hit Thea apostrophe on the keyboard, that'll pull up our title safe. And if you select the layer here and hit you twice on the keyboard, that actually pulls up any property that we have adjusted on layer. So because we just clicked anywhere in the in the comp to create our typeface, the positions actually changed because it's not set to the default. I'm just gonna go ahead and hit the reset switch here that pumps it directly center. And because I want my actual typeface to be center, I'm gonna go ahead and move that down. Let's go ahead and put it on 600. And that's what worked pretty well. Now, because this is a banner, we don't actually need it to be this full HD resolution that we set up. Um, I think that it's gonna be best if we give a little bit of leading space almost eyes and then a little bit up top for the type of information that we want to do. But we don't want to use too much because then the space isn't gonna work for our for our block. So let's go ahead and go back into our composition settings. That's control K or command cave your own apple. And from here, we can actually just scrub this and pull it down to something that works for us. I'm gonna go and keep going, and I think I want just we don't really need much space on the side. So let's move this all the way to 1300. Yeah, that should work. And then the heights we can pull down quite a bit and we don't want You don't want a top banner to be to talk cause it's gonna take up too much of your site real estate. So if we pull this down to 500 that should be enough that we can We can play around with some particle effects and get the rest of our animation just like what we did before. So, uh, that should be good. 1300 by 500 works for me. Now your name is going to be different. And if you want to set this up as a square format or any other format, this is where you make that change now. So I hit, OK, and that should get us started. We're going to go ahead and set up a solid for our background. No, my my site background. I know the hex code for that's gonna be 2121 21 says a dark gray. And the way I pull up the solid settings is I hit control. Why? On the keyboard that creates a new solid. If I go ahead and cancel that and then just go to layer new solid that's control. I hear it's a command. Why on Apple and will have to re input our number here. And let's go ahead and name this our background color and hit OK, and then we'll just take that layer and put it underneath our motion addicts text layer and we're good together and we can hit apostrophe again to turn off our title safe settings. That way we know this is Senator New Looks good. Moving on to the next section, we're going to be discussing how to set up a color palette that will then work for all of our existing pre cops that we're going to create and we'll move on from there. 4. Linking your Color Palette with AE Expressions: all right. Now that we have our composition settings in place and our title up on screen, we're going to go ahead and create our color palette, using after effects expressions in order to link the layers to each other. And we're gonna show you how to do that right now. All right, let's go into after effects. And this is where we left off the last. The last lesson. We've got our title in place and are background color. So for this, let's go ahead and create a separate comp for the color settings. So we'll go to you can right click here to go to new composition where you can click are little icon again, and for this it actually doesn't need to be large at all. So let's just go ahead and do you 10 by 10. It doesn't matter the size, really. This is just gonna be clearly a reference composition, so we'll call this our color palettes. Now you can see me putting these underscores in front of the name. The reason why I do that is because it throws it at the top of the naming. Um, if if it's in alphabetical order, it will put it up there. That way, you'll you'll see later on. When you start to create a lot of cops, you can you can adjust which ones you want to see on top, in which ones that are just gonna be in the rest of alphabetical order. So that's our color palette. And for this comp, all we need is a new layer. You got a new and then hit a no object that is controlled shift why? Or command all shift wife. You're on Apple that you'll put a no object in our scene. And, uh, we can name this our controller layer if you hit. Enter on the keyboard while you have the layer selected that lets you name it. So this is our controller. And under the effects and presets here, we're going Teoh type in color control. And this is an expressing, a new expression control that will then let us link just this color attribute to different layers. So we'll go ahead with our controller layers selected here if you double click. It adds the effect over here on the top left panel. Um, and it's got a color selection. So for the first color. We're going ahead and select white all the way and we'll name this white. And then if you hit control de while the effect is selected, that will duplicate the effect on the layer. And for this one we'll just go ahead and call this our primary. And for my blawg, I had this, Ah, sea foam kind of pale green. I'm just we're just gonna eyeball it. It's not a big deal, and that should be fun. And I would like to make some secondary colors now, so we'll go ahead and duplicate that again. Controlled the and we'll do our secondary secondary one and it's fun. And let's go ahead and make our orangy yellow pale yellow. You wanted to contrast a little bit, but it's not that big of a deal. These will be kind of separated, so hit OK there and then we'll do our control de tricking him secondary to and let's go ahead and select a pill ish pink. Yeah, those those contrast quite a bit so I like the way these colors work. That's why in for my blawg, I have this kind of seafoam green set up now for you. These colors can be whatever you want them to be. I would choose complementary colors because you want a little bit of contrast, since they are gonna be animating next to each other and you want you want them to pop a little bit. So from here we have our controller set up. Now, the easiest way to link this controller palette Ah, back to our original text layer is if we have just selected, let's go ahead and stack them on top of each other and let's pull this up So we have a little bit more room to work with for each of our palates and within here, let's go ahead and set up a. Just. It doesn't matter what we do. We can just do it another solid That's control. Why again on your keyboard And this color could be whatever we want. It does not matter, and we'll go ahead and we'll call this our primary reference. And the reason why we're doing this is so that we can have an expression to reference. So if we go back to our controller color palette layer and we type into this little search menu color that pulls up all of our, uh, all of our effects that are on this layer that have the name color within them. And since there's four different colors that and pulled up every single one, that's pretty useful. And then we'll go back to our animated banner panel. We can we can actually turn that off. It doesn't matter what I mean. Keep it on and we'll now go to our affection presets and set a fill effect. And let's go ahead and dragged that onto or solid lier. Now the only reason why we're doing this is again so that we have this expression to reference. So once we have that set upon their you, you can hit E on the on the layer, and that will pull the effect here or again weakened, then type in color, and that will show the color fill effective that we're looking for here. And let's go ahead and Ault click on the color stopwatch and that pulls up our expressions . Editor. We don't actually have to worry about what's actually being typed in here. All we have to do is use this expression Pickwick tool, and if you click and drag and you dragged down Teoh are color, and we're gonna use our primary color here and you could see it. Auto feels this expression for us. So it's referencing the comic color palette, the layer controller and the effect our primary color. So that's all we need. We hit enter on the num pad that'll close that layer and boom. There's our There's our color from our fill effect. So if we then weaken, duplicate this layer and if you hit E twice on the layer, it will actually show you the expression that is involved with that layer. So it pulls out up automatically. And now, if if we want to, we can pick, whip, or we can just come in here and under primary, we can type in secondary one, and that's the That's the name of the other effective we have down there and then we don't want toe enter. We want to enter on the num pad and boom. That's our secondary color. So it is actually linking directly to that. Now, if I were to change this year, do this weird brown and go back. That has changed as well, so that's exactly what we want to see Well, I'll show you why this is really important later once we get into pre camping. But just how have these in here as a reference is awesome. So let's go ahead and controls the that. So we don't see it, and we condemn This are secondary and I'm going to move on to the next section. Well, duplicate these layers again and put the rest of our color palettes in place. So moving on to the next lesson, I will see you there. 5. Workflow Tools from aescripts.com: all right. In our last class, we learned how to link color expressions to separated cops, and that allows us to create a color palette in one control layer and affect any color that we want to in other cops and will be able to use that to our advantage. Now, in this lesson, we will be discussing two separate techniques for setting up our individual letter animation. One technique is gonna be the manual way if if you want to create all of the different letters in your alphabet, was probably gonna be the easiest way for you to accommodate for that. But if you're just looking to not create 26 animated letters, you just want to do the five or six different letters that are in your name or however many letters that you have available in your banner, then, Ah, I feel like the easiest way is to use these tools from a scripts dot com. So let's go ahead and open up aftereffects. And from here, let's go ahead and take our referenced color layers. And let's change the color tag. Roman was due seafoam just so that we know that that's our color palette. on, Let's just move that to the back. And we don't have to worry about seeing, um I've turned those layers off. So now, Ah, in order to animate the individual letters, we're going to want to turn our live text into an after effects shape layer that will give us all sorts of control over the animation and shape of the object. So, ah, in order to do that, all you have to do is a right click on the layer and say, Create shapes from text A Z could see that turns into a motion addicts outline. That's gonna be, um, if you scroll down here into the contents. It has all of our individual letters into actual shapes here. So I can turn them off individually now because they are all within one layer here, and they all have the transforms of that layer. It's not really gonna do us any good. We want We want all of these letters actually to be individual within separate cops, so you can't. There's not really a good way to do that. One way that you can do that is just manually. Uh, like I said, there's two different methods to it. The manual method is just to create a new comp, and we'll create this by 400 by 400. Here, we'll name it. Well, it's just naming him for, uh, the first letter that we're looking to animate and all these other settings were fine. And within this letter, we can take when you take our motion addicts outlines here. Or actually, I would go ahead and take the live text. Let's copy that. Paste it. It's not turned on now that it is, and then double click there and hit him. And as you can see, it's It's not centered in our comp here. So if you just select the competent, hit you twice on the keyboard and then hit our recent transform, Ah, and then move that down about, uh, let's say 2 75 And that's about centered. There s So that is how you get the individual letter inside of just a regular com for itself. And then, if you want, I would create a folder fall of your animated letters. The way to do that is to take this composition in the project panel and drag it into the folder, and then what's type animated letters. And now we have that, um, separated in there. And then since this is live text, we want to turn it into a shape layer again. That's create shapes from text when you're right, click on the layer. And now we have our in as an outline by itself in its comp S O. That would set us up for the next lesson. But let's go ahead. Let's look at another method to do this. Basically, the I feel like this is probably the easier method, especially if you were only looking to animate just our title sequence that we have here. Or like titles. Everyone here we don't want to animate all 26 individual letters. I think that that using these tools from a scripts dot com are probably going to be your best bet. So let's go to a scripts dot com I've gotta pulled up here. This is the explode shape layer script. It is invaluable to me because as you as you saw previously, when you have all of those letters and one shape layer, it doesn't really do you any good. But what this does is it breaks him out to be individual shape players that that you can just unplug into individual layers and you're good to go. So this is $30 eso if you don't. If you don't want to use this tool, you know the manual method is fine. It just takes a little bit longer for you to get each individual letter, Doug. So But I would recommend purchasing this and going through the steps of installing it. And then the other tool is gonna be the smart pre composer. Now this This does have your name, your own price. I paid full price for it. I use this thing all the time, so I would definitely recommend if you can't handle the $30 you know, just pay 15 or do whatever you need, but I would definitely recommend giving been Rawlinson money because this script is awesome and it works really well. So go ahead and purchase that and install it. I'm not going to show you how to do that, but get those working on your after fix and we'll go back and aftereffects and show you how to use those. Now again, we're going to want all of our individual shape players here under the motion addicts outlines, we're gonna want all of those to be in individual layers. So the way to do that is by using this explode shape, layer tool. I haven't pulled up in my panel here, but if you don't, if you don't have it once you install it, it's under the window and our explode shape players. That'll pull up a panel here, and we should be good to go. So one thing about this tool is with whatever name your layer is going to be already. It's going to actually do that for all the individual layers that explode out. So I would go ahead and rename this. We could just rename it another score. If we want that. We don't have any name that will mess with it, and it'll be good to go. So let's go ahead and do that and select, um will use all shapes for our method here. We don't care about deleting the source layer. If you want to, you can check that and then center that anchor points is what we want. So that way all of our all of our position keys are then centered and all of our individual letters will all have their own transforms. So with that, with that underscore, layer selected now will hit exploded. And as you can see, that typed out, Um, put all the letters in there, and it has all of these under individual shape players. And all of the transforms are centered because you can tell about the anchor point is centered to each one, So that's pretty great. And now, if we want to then create our own individual pre compositions for each letter, which we do want to do, it will make it very easy for us in the long run than the easy way to do that. Eyes using pre composer. Now the reason why you have to use pre composer is are the smart pre composer. Because if you were going to try to pre composed this shape layer by itself by going Teoh layer pre compose or control shift see again on the hot key junkie, Um, if you were going to try to pre compose this, you will see here that the believe all attributes in animated banner eyes not selected or it's not selectable eso it's gonna move on attributes to the new composition and I'll show you why That's a bad thing. So if we were just to delete this here and hit, OK, you could see that the whole layer eyes now the size of the comp instead of before how it was just the it was just the size of the letter there. So if I were to open up that in the M is off centered, that's not what we want. We don't want to have to go into these individual letters and re transform every single one . That's a pain. So let's go ahead and delete that composition and go back to our animated better. And, uh, it's it's completely gone. So let's go ahead and controls you all that stuff, okay, So back in this animated Boehner palette, if we now select all of these individual layers and the naming conventions weird, but that's fine. Uh, if you go to our smart pre composer tool and with all of the default settings, it should be good to go. If you hit pre compose, this will go through, and it pre composes each individual letter to be its own comp, and it scales them accordingly. and centers of transforms. And as you can see with the s selected Now you can see those, uh, those brown squares that air the size of the comp is actually scale to each one. So again, we go into our MPRI composed later and it is scaled properly. So now we have all of these letters here that we can put in our animated letters folder and they are all the scales or all the scales air at least set accordingly to what they need to be. Ah, And if we wanted to go into RM layer and resize it to our 400 by 400 format, which I would recommend, then all you have to do is go into the composition settings of the pre company. And it is it is there. It's good to go and it's ah, it's okay. So, again, this is our This is RM that we manually created, and this is our MPRI composed layer moving on to the next section. I will show you how to individually animate the M and get all of that unique animation that we had going in our final. So I'll see you in the next lesson. 6. Animating a Letter with Shape Layers (Part 1 of 2): all right. Now that we have all of that organizational stuff out of the way, we can move on to the next lesson and get into some more fun things. Ah, in this lesson, we're going to be discussing how to use these shape layers to create all sorts of different types of animations. We're gonna be animating the path of the shape layer. We're also going to be using different paths in order. Teoh set up little stroke animations and we're going to be again linking back to our color palette set up in order, Teoh, be able to individually change the colors. Ah, once we get all of our letters set up, so let's move into after effects. And as you can see, I've done a little bit of housekeeping. Um, with my comp, I've renamed all of my pre comp letters. Uh, I haven't adjusted the scale of them yet, but we're just gonna be jumping into, um, the M animated comp first, Uh, that's where we're gonna be doing all of our animation. So let's go ahead and open that. And let's let's name this layer in, um, let's go ahead and name and main outlines okay. And, um, the reason why I want to do that is because we're about to adjust all sorts of things. So let's go ahead and duplicate that layer. And, um, let's let's hit this shy, um, this little shy but in here and let's hide that for now. So and all you have to do is you just hit this little this little shy switch, and that'll hide any layers that you select with shy. So we'll go ahead and hide that for now. That way, we just have ah, reference outlined to go back to. So the first thing I'm gonna want to be is I'm going to want to write on kind of this in this main, um, this main M lettering. And so, in order to do that well, if you hit you twice on the keyboard, that pulls up all the information here that has been changed for this for this set up. So we don't need any kind of stroke coloring, So let's go ahead and delete that out. Um, all we're really focusing on is this in path here and the fill color. Now let's go ahead and linked back this color to our main primary color. So again, let's remember how to do that. If we g o if we go back to our animated banner and select our primary reference hey E twice on the keyboard, that's going to pull up. I'm sorry. That's really low at the bottom here. That's going to pull up our expression here. And we just need to copy this whole expression hit control C copy the text and then under our color here. If we then select Ault or you hold all 10 hit the stopwatch. That's gonna pull up the expression editor again. And let's go ahead and pace that in a place so you'll see this turns from white to our little are green color palette that we chose before this. This can easily be changed to whichever one you want. Now that we have this in place, we just go back to our color palette and we can we can change this color to anything that we wanted to be. So I like that green, though. So, um, let's we'll stick with that for now, and we should be good to go. So the first thing I'm gonna want to do is we're gonna call these, we're gonna name these things kind of arbitrarily. It's mostly just based off of the the style of animation that we want to do. So for this one, I'm gonna call this this the first pillar. And then this will be pillar number two on the right side And then, uh, the stroke in the middle. It doesn't really matter. We can call a view. We can call it whatever we want. So this 1st 1 will call our pillar animation. Well, just name this pillar one for a main pillar. All we need to do is select the impart, not the path. And you can see how all of these air now, individually selectable we Kotor Pimental here and hold, click and hold, and then go to the deleted vertex tool This is going to we're gonna be able to remove, um, all of the points that we don't want in our first pillar. So, um, so there we have it. And as you can see, um, there's a little bit of discrepancy here with the alignment of where this is where this is a line to the top here. So I think we can problem will probably want just the regular straight line here. Um, but But I think it's I think it's fine for now because what we're gonna do is is animate this up in a very, very easy fashion. So eso without set up now we have our main pillar, and we're still seeing a white pillar here. And the reason is is because we have that Our main outline. Um, we haven't shied, but it is still in. It's still in the comp. So as you can see, the pillar is our second player. The main outline is still there, and if we want to, we can actually just let's just go ahead and drop the transparency down a little bit. That way, it's not too distracting, but we can still see it as a visual guide. So now that we have our main pillar selected, the easiest way to set this up is through What I what is called a right on effect Now you can actually use the effect the right on effect here. Ah, that comes in after effects or what I would suggest is is setting up a shape layer, uh, to use as a track matte. So let me explain what that is now with no layer selected. If I select the pin tool and I'll turn off the Phil here and I will this stroke Ah, at a pretty wide stroke that works perfectly fine. And what we'll do is we'll click here on the bottom and then holding shift, we'll click again at the top, and that creates an exact street line. It's got a really thick stroke on it. As you can see, uh, you can actually come up here and adjust how thick that is. But we actually wanted to overlap the entire the entire side there, and we will. Now that this is a new shape layer, we will call this our right layer so we'll just call it right one. And in order to use this as a right on layer for the pillar, all we have to do is select our pillar and hit track Matte and Alfa Matt. And as you can see, that that right layer actually goes away altogether and the, um, the pillar is all that were left with, So this is pretty cool. Now, what we can do is let's go ahead and jump into this right? I just double hit you on the keyboard again. And what we want to be able to affect here is if we hit this content, add button and go to trim path. That's going to create this little trim path effect. And as you can see, the start and the end have percentages. Here we have on Offset that we can adjust and we don't have multiple shapes to worry about . But we can get into that a little bit later, but right now we can just have this 100% mode. So let's go ahead and move, moving our timeline a little bit and let's say 20 frames in. According to you, our time code will hit the stop Watch for the end, and then we'll go back to the beginning and hit this 100 down to zero. And as you can see as I was sliding that it actually moved. Um, that whole color. So, uh, so now you can see what it's actually doing. Um, if you scrub in between, it's actually just writing that up, So Ah, the way this is working is it's using the alpha the thickness here of this white stroke. Like if I turned their back on, you can see how thick that is. It's using this whole Alfa, um, in order to basically be a cutting mat for the layer below it. So eso if we turn that back off its That's why these little Matt icons appear on these layers. This is this is madding based off of this little white outline. Um, that's basically how it works. And so So with this, we have our first piece animated the seven second time line. We don't need that whole thing to preview. So if you hit in on the keyboard just like one of the half second tier that will move our work area, Teoh basically allow us to preview this animation. So if we go back up to our top panel here, there's a preview section. This is called a ramp review. If you hit zero on the number pad arm, that will actually play based off of that. And as you can see, this is animating and it's looping Now. This is pretty boring the way it's set up here. So, and the reason why is because it's using linear key frame animation and it doesn't have any easing whatsoever. So it's literally going between our 20 seconds. Teoh just feel that entire thing. So what will want to do is ah well, want to adjust the easing on that? So if you select these key frames and hit F nine on the keyboard, or, uh, if you go in here under key frame assistance, uh, it'll turn on the Eazy e's, um, which we can do that here that will allow for easing. So let's go ahead and preview about that back. So it's a little bit more interesting, but not very much so if we g o. If we actually want to dive into this, we'll open up our graph editor and this gives a bridge of how fast Ah, things are moving. So if we again using R. V s electoral, if we want this to say, we want this to, like, start off really slow and in hard on a ramp, so we wanna grab this beginning layer and pull this out. As you can see, it's like a slow ease it and then it ramps up really fast and then say this will end like really, really hard so well, if we pull that spike all the way, it's gonna it's almost gonna pop in a place and we can see what that looks like. So it Z like slow and then pop. That's a little bit harsh, so let's go ahead and drag that out. Teoh say about think about 15% of of the velocity is good. So So let's go ahead and animate that. See how it feels so that easing feels pretty good overall, Um, that's about what we're looking at, I think, with with how we want to animate the rest of these so moving on, we will get into our secondary shape layer. So, uh, if we want to kind of re use this set up here, all we have to do is, ah, select our two layers here and let's go ahead and let's re color this right layer. Let's let this be yellow. So it's easy to parse on Ben. Let's go ahead and duplicate thes. So now we have pillar to it is still the same pillar, so we'll take our main outline here and w let's grab the Let's grab the path here and hit copy and then go back to our pillar to and under this path will paste so the entire path is back. Um, now we don't want the entire path. So what we want to again do is we'll go back to our pencil, are delete Vertex Tool and with the pillar to selected, go to the M. And then let's just start deleting points. And we want to keep all the ones on the right. You know, the ones on the left and boom, we're ready up. So now if we play back, our animation thing is strange. And that's because the truck, Matt, the right to layer is still over this pillar. We just need to move that path altogether. So we then go back to our selection tool and hit again. You on the keyboard to pull the path. Uh, we can now select that entire path and let's just go ahead and move it over. And now, uh, if we get rid of our key from sir, um now we have both of our pillars kind of animating up. Now, this looks kind of funny with, with both going the same direction. So let's go ahead and swap if we go back to our path here. Um, if we select this path and then double click on it and that'll that'll kind of let you adjust the entire path as a whole. You can actually then rotate if you hold the outside. So here. And if while you're rotating, if you hit shift, it's kind of going to pop on angles here. So we want to pop this this one to the top and the other one of the bottom and let's see where that doesn't look like it's aligning properly, so we'll just want justice up a little bit. You wanna hold shift to make sure that it's on the same path? Wine and eso that's gonna be our path set the opposite direction. So, um, so now there, if you want, we scrub through, they're going the opposite way. Now again, um, if you go back to our animation principles and fundamentals and there's all sorts of stuff that you can learn, uh, one things that you learn is overlapping animation. Um, and what tends to happen is that if you do animation where your things were happening in the exact same time, it's not really interesting to the I because you can't really parse what's happening once typically. So, um so just by taking these key frames that are part of the right to layer and just offsetting them slightly, Um, this will give us a little bit more of an interesting animation, so that's pretty cool. So let's go ahead and use that technique to write on the V part of our animation. So let's go ahead, and I'm gonna go pretty quickly here, just duplicate this layer. We'll call this V, and then we need to take our main outlines, grab the pack and go back into RV and pay start pack. And I'm hitting you on the keyboard when I don't have anything selected that brings up all of the animated King frames on def. You hit it again and take them all away so that just a quick way to clean up the cop or the clean up clean up the layer palace that you're looking at. So now we have this this full thing here, we wanna go ahead and lead our paths out again with the delete ver textile, and we just want the V again. Okay, so there's RV and basically, you want this now to write on, um, the same way. So we take our right tool, and now we only have two points to work with. So let's go ahead. And with our right tool selected, if we have it, we turn back on the mental. Ah, we can actually just create new points. And the easel. These will work just fine. So to do, like, a full path there. And then, uh, let's hit the layer selection again and then go a full path here and boom. We got all sorts passed to work with on as you can see, um, it's doing some interesting things already because we already have an animated. So, um, so this one will just want to go back and forth, rules it back into the shape layer settings and look through our paths here and this. This third shape half is the last one that we created, so shaped one eye's gonna be the first path that writes on the pillar. We don't need that anymore. So let's go ahead and delete that shape path. Our trim paths is still underneath everything. So everything is still working just fine there. But really. We kind of want we I think we want to write on these individual letters one after the other . So So since we have it on two different sets, we kind of need to do to get this letter again. So let's go ahead and do that. Well, did you get it? And then under this right three, this will be our first path. Lett's delete this last shape layer. So it's just the right to or just that just that direction and then under this one will delete in the other direction the shape, too. So now that what you're seeing here is the clipping of these different to write layers that are a little bit thicker than actual um, the actual with of the shape here. So one thing that we're gonna want to do is we're going to want to adjust that with per shape that we have. The one thing we can do is let's just go ahead and solo this first V layer. So this is all we're seeing right on. And yeah, that's where our clipping is coming into play. So in order to fix this, will you go to our right layer and select our path here. And as you can see, all you have to do is kind of move your path over. And, um, and it's with is no longer affecting the other side. So and another, another way is if you were to just adjust the stroke with here, that adjust is it as a whole? So we don't really want to do that. I think I think thirties probably fine, because all we're doing is we're just track matting, these separate areas, but, um, but that will. That will give you basically that exact struck with that you want and in a place they're. So let's go ahead. We'll unsold that, and we'll solo the other one and we'll do the exact same adjustment. So we'll go into the right four layer and take the path, and I am selecting just a path here, not the path underneath. If you select the path underneath that will move the entire path, you don't want that. You just want to select this path one tool here and let's go ahead and just kind of move that over, and that's good to go. Okay, so now we have all of our individual layers animating and again we just want to kind of sequence our animation so that it makes sense. So the pillar to should actually be the last one animating. So let's go ahead and throw that on top. And that should kind of go that you go last year and then the pillar are the V. V one is gonna go first, Um, right after right after the pillar one. And then V two will kind of go in a place right after that. So this is where you can get, like, really nice and, um, and tricky with your animations to to make sure that things were lining up properly so we don't want we don't want our V one to start before the pillar ends. So, um, so what we'll do here is, well, kind of page. That right there is probably want this one to start. So we'll just those key friends over. And as you can see, it's it's kind of leading into that so we don't have to move it all the way over. And then, uh, and then now that that's ready in place, we kind of wanted we want to do the same thing for the V two. So if that's the beginning, we want to do that. And I think it's actually kind of interesting. Let's to do their right to, like the the pillar number two, Um, as the other ones are going. I think it's interesting. Since it's going, it's a little bit different, and it can kind of it can make. It could make for an interesting animation toe. Have a little bit overlapping animation like that. So now that we have our main right on effect done, Uh, sorry. We need to remove our move. Our preview. Now that we have our main right on effect. Ready, let's go ahead and start adding the individual outlines, which will be set up in part two of this animation. 7. Animating a Letter with Shape Layers (Part 2 of 2): All right, welcome to part two of our animated lettering. So this is where we left off. We just have our right on stroke effect, Um, that we're getting our main M chunk in the place. So let's go ahead and add a little bit more fun and detail to it. The easiest thing to do eyes just to get our extra color palette into play. And to do that, we can just offset our animation that we have now into, uh, into a different method. So So one way to do that is you can, um, you can come in here and just duplicate all of these layers and let's go ahead and move them up in the comp so that they're all separated on, then push him back. And as you can see, there's a lot of layers going on here, so this can get a little bit messy. So what I would recommend is let's go ahead and delete that. And let's select all these and duplicate the or and pre comp the entire animation that we have here. So let's go ahead and hit control shift and hit C that's gonna pull up our pre composed window and we'll call this our, uh, in main animation for just in Maine is fine with me. Hit. Okay, Now you can see that that, uh, in our project palette that actually just came in here and added in Maine into this late this animated letters folder, so away to stay organized again. I'm all about organization away to stay organized for this is this just to select these two and put him in a folder and let's call this folder in. And so now we have all of our we're going to create a couple of pre comes here within rm. Um, now that we have that set up, that's the easiest way to do it. So again we want we want our are separated colors to work accordingly for us. So the easiest way to do that is Teoh, Take this this layer here and duplicated in the camp and we can add a fill effect to the layer. And now it's red. So that's working for us. Basically, what we want Teoh Also another thing that vector layers do so all all of shape players here are actually vector rised within after effects so you can scale them. You could do all sorts of things, but it's because of this continuously rast arise switch is turned on to them by default. Eso if if you notice in our M composition here are pre Kump are pre composed him are in Maine animations. They don't have that switch turned on. So if we were Teoh, scale these and do all sorts of stuff, you'll notice that this gets the skids from blurry. I hit Tilda on the keyboard. By the way, Teoh two. Solo the preview palette. This gets blurry so we don't want to do that. Let's let's go back here and hit. If you hit this continually rest arise, switch and turn it on. You can see that actually sharpened up the M so that it's, uh it's now Rast arising itself, um, at that larger size. So if we were again turn it off switch. It will switch back and forth, and you can see the difference. Eso We want to make sure that that's turned on just so that all of our letters air continued to be sharp. Um, again. So we'll go back to this this Phil layer that we duplicated, uh this is actually gonna be our first color that we want coming on. Uh, and let's let's reset the scale of this. Sorry. Okay. And let's offset Are we want? We want the green color to be our final color That gets revealed. So let's go ahead and offset that back. And so are red One is coming on first, but we want that to be a part of our color palette. So again, how do we How do we do that? We g o um, we go back into our animated better, and we've got our primary color. Pick a cheese here and we want to copy that expression over to will hit Altan that fill color stopwatch. Copy that here. And we don't want the primary color. We actually want one of the secondary colors. So let's do secondary one under the primary there, and there's the yellow, and I don't I don't think that the yellow and green are gonna match up very well together. So what we want to do is duplicate that layer and let's offset that 2nd 1 and we'll say secondary to under that Phil. So now we'll be done is we've gotten all three colors of our our color palette set up and offset into a timeline. So let's go ahead and review what that animation looks like. So that's already a pretty interesting, um, and again the best. The best thing about this ProComp set up is, since we have our main animation layers set up with color there, we don't have to worry about it. And then we've got these easily adjustable in our color palette. But we can Now we can go back into this and if we want to, just timing of our individual paths, because I feel like this isn't going a little bit slow. Um, let's let's go ahead and take these two. And if you hold Ault while having multiple layer multiple key frames selected if you hold Ault and click on a layer, you can actually scale them. Um, kind of within themselves. So I'm gonna It's called Rove. Across time, I'm gonna push this back a little bit. Eso that those go a lot faster, and that will be a little bit more interesting, I think, to look at so let's go back to our main in or a back door in not the main him. And yeah, that looks a little bit more interesting now that those vi's heir going a little bit quicker. So, yeah, now we have Ah, cool color offset animated piece. And that was super simple to set up. Um, I should not say that really fast. That was pretty simple to set up and we could move on Teoh other stops. So again, with our main outlines here still in our comp, we have that for reference. Let's go ahead and duplicate this layer and this I think all of the stroke effects I kind of like having that that white stroke on top of our colors. It just adds like an extra pop two things. So if you remember right, if you come in here and select our feel, color and way still have that expression. Now, if you remember right, I actually named that one controller white, so I can I can put white in there, and it's gonna be that controller that we have, uh, all the way back into our color palette controller. So this one here it's court. It's correlating again with with that color. So if we wanted to, we can change that the black, we can do whatever with it, But I like having that white there. And that way. Once I once I have that all set up and say, Hey, White isn't working for our in palate. I don't have to worry about going into all these individual layers and adjusting all the color. So so now that we have that set up, let's turn this into let's actually turn this into a stroke color. So if you if you want to copy this this expression over directly to another color setting, all you have to do is select this color and paste it there. So both it's gonna go. And we we want these to be stroked outlines. So let's let's call this stroke, uh, stroke right on. And let's go ahead and turn off that main outline layer so that we don't see it anymore, and this is still this still has a fill effect, and let's make sure that our capacities back up. I'm heading t on the keyboard, by the way, to show the capacity, Um, and let's go ahead and let's delete our fill layer and turn on the stroke so that outlines are our shape layer there, and we can do some pretty cool stuff with that. So again, we go to our add functionality here and trim path, and this looks a little bit cooler when you've got a going around the entire thing. So, um, so we'll start well at a key frame here and move along the time line and then go back to zero, and we've got those key firms in place and let's do our easing again. I'm gonna go a little bit faster from here on out because we've already kind of done these steps and for this one, um, I just I wanted to ramp on both, but I don't want it to go extremely fast in this inner cause. I don't get a little bit daunting or that will look a little bit absurd. Once we get too many things going, it won't. So you'll see, um, this right on effect taking place and let's go ahead and let's turn off those other layers so we can just watch this solo right on. Very cool. Now the way we can make this wipe itself or basically just come on and come off really quickly is you can start by, uh, you just copy these key frames that we set for in the end value and paste them to start value. So now, um, it's gonna right on and off using the same kind of style of animation. So let's go ahead and preview that really cool. Okay, So as you can see, that starts here in the bottom corner, which doesn't really make a whole lot of sense for us. So what we want to do, I think is is offset this, um to be maybe let's let's offset it to be this corner starting up. So it's going to, um it's going to start, and it's gonna do the lower part of the A M and then go around. I think that might look a little bit more interesting with everything else that we have going. So let's go ahead and turn that on. So that's pretty cool. And let's turn back on our main enemy layers. And I think we can probably push these back in the time allotted a little bit that we have a little bit more room for r R m toe right itself on. So that looks pretty cool overall, and let's go ahead and put that. Let's put that right on. On top of these eso that it's it's riding and it's you're still able to see it once the colors come up. So yeah, pretty cool. Now, another effect that I did in the final in emission is using using that exact same technique I can. Now I can duplicate that. And let's call this our stroke. Let's just call it the stroke one. That's kind of like a main stroke effect that we're going to do. And under the path year we we don't need to worry about that. Let's create a new path and let's go ahead and just kind of set a straight line again. That's clicking and holding shift and clicking in. And now we've got a straight line set up, so that's underneath the main shape here. What we want to do is we want to take that path and move it to here so that were still able to use our our color set up that we had before and delete this him out and delete that shape. We don't need that anymore. And now you can see um, we want to turn this off, set back to the euro, you could see from start to finish. It's actually just kind of like riding on that. And so let's go ahead and make our stroke with a little bit thicker. Sorry, the strip before was set to to, uh, let's actually go ahead and let's do that a little bit lighter. So under that stroke setting, um, stroke with here. If you have the layer selected, you can actually change it here. Let's go ahead and make that one. And so now that stroke is a little bit thinner and let's go back into our main structure and let's make this a little bit thicker. Let's go four. So now it's a little bit thicker and a count of we're giving extra. We're giving extra dimension by changing the weights of a few different things and on that's going to give a little bit more in detail to our overall look. So that looks pretty cool to me. Um, and now if we hit you again on our keyboard, get rid of all these key frames and then hit you again, we want this to actually go by pretty quick So let's adjust these key frames accordingly. Um, I kind of like the entire line of drawn and then draw off. So we were offsetting those key frames of the end and the start to kind of work that way. And, um and we want these key frames to be almost. We want that to be like the first thing that happens. So that's still that's going pretty quick. So let's go ahead and just that and or that's going really slow. Let's make it faster. Oh, that's that's a lot better. So let's go ahead. And we want to do that. Um, basically for all of our little right on arcs and I don't give us a little bit more detailed to look at, So So let's go ahead and duplicate that stroke. And again if we you select path here, let's move forward in time. So we have our am always written out and then with the selection tool, knew that in the place. And ah, I'm not Actually it's popping onto the guide lier, and we don't actually need that right now, so let's go ahead and turn that off. Ah, I hate control. Uh, cynical and to do that. And so let's have this right on exactly across that so and this is just it doesn't have to be centered. It's kind of just the thing that we're doing to give a little bit interesting animation. So that's good to go. And let's go ahead and offset those timings. So it's like, uh, it's riding on the 1st 1 and then the 2nd 1 And let's duplicate that layer and move the move the path again. So let's move the in path there in the beginning pass to you the bottom, and that's kind of that should be good. Let's offset that again and duplicate one more time. And let's move the path of one more time and for this one will do it right here and right there. And if you want this, if you want the straight line, you can deeply get the 1st 1 I don't know if that's like, extremely necessary. This is more of just a fast thing that's going really quick so they would get we're gonna offset that one. So now we've already got way more interesting animation. We've got all sorts of things happening. We have our our first thin stroke. That's kind of building on the main letter. And then we've got our thick main attributes to those colors going in a place. And then we have our little struck right on that air. Kind of adjusting the whole thing here. And as you can see again with our timing, we want to adjust. Let's adjust these first V strokes to be a little bit quicker overall, Um, since knows those are shorter and then it's kind of move that in the place. There you go. Okay. And then one extra detail that I added in with the last minute was to take in this stroke right on. That's our full outline. One. Let's go ahead and duplicate that toe layer moving to the top and put it at the end. And then so this will be kind of like a final thing once everything said and then this is gonna outline the entire, uh, are lying the entire thing. So let's go ahead and get rid of all the key firms here. And if you hit W again and pull up there, are you twice on the keyboard, not W on and then hit the add content tool. We'll go ahead. Air hit a offset path. Now it It's kind of broken because of the order that things are happening. So you want this offset path to be above the trim path, and now you see automatically. It's offsetting that to fit kind of outside the path, so that's pretty cool. All we have to do is just go into there and then adjust. The amount gets. I think 10 is a little bit high. I think five will probably work pretty well. Um and yeah, so that's kind of outlining our him as a whole. And let's go ahead and let's offset that trim path animation one more time. And let's have it start from the bottom of this time. And as you can see with this offset path, it actually changed the direction that the path is writing where before it was, it's writing, uh, counterclockwise here for that main outline. And then this new one is riding clockwise. So that's kind of just an interesting thing that happens and adds a little bit more flavor to our animation. So I think this is this is happening a little bit late. Let's go ahead and move that forward in the timeline so that as everything finishes up, we have that just finishing up a swell and let's move a little bit more and let's adjust our preview. So here we go. We've got all sorts of animation happening. Um, and that that was pretty easy to set up. It didn't take too long. Um, it's once you get once, you're pretty good at this. You can go a lot faster than what we just didn't know. Um, but yeah, we have a full animated letter. It's it's pretty awesome. Uh, eso from here. What we're going to do is I'm going to we're gonna move on and we're gonna do another letter in a slightly different way. Ah, and we can show some different techniques that will go through. And that way we can work through a couple of problems and get another letter done. So I hope you enjoyed this lesson. Um, this is the end of the two part here, and we will move on to animating an A in the next lesson. 8. Animating the “A” using the Shape Path: all right. Now, in the last lesson, we wouldn't have to do the track matted stroke right on effect. It's got all sorts of different names to it because there's a 1,000,000 ways to do things and aftereffects, but basically we're using the stroke the line. In order to write on the different sections of the In this lesson, we're going to be animating the A, and we're going to animate the actual path that the A shape layer is created with, and it allow for a slightly different technique. So if you didn't like the last technique, then this one can You can use this in a little bit different of ways, and you can get some more interesting looks out of it. So let's go ahead and go back in after effects. And, um, here, depending on how you're you're setting up your cops, um, the different ways I think the easiest method is gonna be Teoh. Let's go into our a calm and let's make sure that this is scaled the same size as the other one. So our A s entered. And again, let's do our outline for the A. So we'll call this our a um, outlines and let's go ahead and duplicate that layer. And this will be our shy layer at first. Um, and let's hit the opacity on that. Okay? I think the ah, the easiest method that weaken do here Teoh get the same animation out of it is to let's let's grab these stroke players from the top down and let's go ahead and copy them over and just paste them into place in the B a comp ascendancy. They're all kind of in there, um, and doing their own thing with him, and we can we can use those letters. So let's go ahead and turn those off. But what we wanted out of there was we wanted that expression. So let's so let's take that and apply that back to our color of the fill color. Here and again, let's use our primary color and hit Enter on the Nam pat. OK, so that's gonna be our A in place with the proper color. So let's go ahead and let's shy those layers as well. Okay, so they're all side. Let's go. Let's give rebel. Okay, so now that we're looking at just r a outlined this our main one will call it aiming. Um, what we can do with this is let's go ahead and jump into the path here. As you can see, the A uses two paths because it's actually using one path to cut out the other. It's using this triangular shaped path here in the center to cut from the rest of the path , so that's kind of important to note. I'll explain why later, whenever we are messing with our offsets. But let's go ahead and let's remove this stroke again. So we just have our main field color and let's set up our guides. Now I remember we set up our guides for the last one, and we didn't end up using them. But this this method will actually and abusing our our guides quite a bit. So let's hit control are and let's go ahead and drag a guide out and again, we need to get really kind of tight in here and let's select this layer, and I'm gonna go ahead and hit the tilde key on the keyboard. And then that pulls up the whole thing, and I zoomed in all the way and make sure that I'm aligning to that perfectly. Okay, So want to pull another path out and align to that top one and snow? Now we have that main, um, that main column and let's go ahead and pull another guide here, Teoh intersect. And then let's do a guide on the bottom here to get our intersection. So and the reason why I'm doing this again is because I think it be cool if all the letters kind of start with the singular pillar that we discussed before and then create out into another shape. So for this A. I think it be. I think it's pretty neat for just a kind of like right on the first pillar, and then just expand out into the the a letter that we see here. So now that we have our never have our guides in place, uh, we can go ahead and we're gonna need one more for the center. So again, let's go ahead on the line that Okay, so now that we have our guys in place, let's go ahead and jump back into our path and we're gonna put key frames directly on our paths. So let's go ahead and the first thing we want to do is kind of move ahead in our timeline and set up a key frame. So this is what the path is going to turn into eventually. So for this bottom one here, let's go ahead and move that out further. That's the That's the secondary triangular path. Let's move that out further because that's going to come in later than the first part. So the bottom one, we'll go ahead and we'll move those. And if you select the layer and hold shift and then, as you can see, it pops directly to that guide on Bit's gonna do that based on the line that it was already on. So there you go. And then if you selected next one and hold shift and it pops directly again to that guy layer. And for all intents and purposes, it is gone, so so that key frames directly in between there. And as you can see when you scrub the timeline, it's ah, it's widening itself, so that's pretty cool. And then from there, let's go ahead and move to the beginning of our timeline, and let's do that to all of these kind of separate layers was put these in the center here . You know what that is, centered. And then the outside won. We're gonna want to be our main pillar. So let's do that. And there we go. So, a zoo you can see here. We've got our animation going from the pillar here, Uh, and then expanding outwards, kind of all at once are separated out in the timeline. So this could look pretty cool depending on how we want to do it. Um, if we want to delay this bottom expansion a little bit longer thing kind of public place. So let's go ahead and do that. Um, let's move our key frames a little bit, uh, slightly. And then let's say, like, as this is expanding out, we actually, we kind of won the used to get stuck to the center. Um, that'll give us his overlapping animation, and it will feel like it's creating a lot of force behind the animation because it z gonna pop out, and then these other ones are stuck in. Then they'll pop in a place to So, um, so we'll do that by, uh, let's start with easing this with our easy escape key frames. And then, UM, let's let's go into that graph editor again and looks pull that handle out slightly to do, like around 60%. And then So so now that's already kind of happening. And then So let's add another key frame kind of towards the end. Here you just go and hit the key for him over here. And let's you need to de select that path again so that you can grab those individual path or those individual points. And with that key frame in place now you can Let's go ahead and read smack that right in the center. Boo. So Okay, let's Ah, let's go ahead and set our work. Compare e um, and zoom out and let's play that back with zero on the night that so this is really slow. So, uh, so let's go ahead and with all these key frames, set up, hold Ault on the keyboard and was kind of rove across time. And let's let's have this happened, like less than a second. So let's move that over. Yeah, there we go. So, as you can see, um, the bottom line in place is ah, it's it's got that delayed kind off pull apart, and that's pretty cool. The bottom one is a lot less interesting because we don't have or the top. This top triangle is a lot of us interesting because we don't have a whole lot. We don't have any easing on it, and nothing is really happening with that. So let's go ahead and set up, are easing on that. Let's go ahead and pull that to 100% so that it gets really stuck and it doesn't want to move, and then it just kind of pops in a place. So we'll turn the graph editor off. So as you can see, it's like it's forcing itself out. It doesn't really want to do it, so that looks pretty cool. And then let's move these key firms back to get a little bit more overlap. That way, this is happening kind of together, but a little bit separated. So yeah, that looks pretty nice. Um, that's gonna look pretty fluid once we get this written on. Um and we can just do that in the exact same method that we did before. So eso Let's go ahead and let's move these key firms back all together because we want to leave room for our main pillar to ride on first. And then these will kind of expand our as a secondary thought. So let's go ahead. And the easiest thing we could do and just go into our m main layer. Since we already have this this right affecting place, we can go ahead and control, see that command, see, own apple and go back into here and then just paste it right in a place boom. We have our right layer back in a place on this already has our animation key for him set up. So that's pretty nice. And then if we don't hit you twice on the keyboard and goto our path, we can actually pop this right in the place on snap it directly to our center point here. Um, and that works for me. Okay, so now we have our we turn that on, we have our right on effect, coming right back up. And, um and one thing that you'll notice here is that it's on Lee, the with of this of this main column. So if we set this to be a Alfa Matt Track layer. Um again, that that will turn. We need to turn this first layer off. Oh, it's ah, we're missing. We're missing one thing here that will happen. If you have Shyla hairs, you'll notice that this index number is one and this is actually eight. Um so that means that there are layers in between here. So let's turn our shar layers off, and that's that's a mistake that does happen. Eso it's definitely important to point out. And you could see that this is actually Alfa matting based off of this stroke layer. So we don't want that we wanted to be off off of our right layer, and now we have that directly in the place. So, uh, yeah, I made a mistake and we learned something from that. So that's good. Let's go ahead and turn our shy layers back on. So we get rid of those and, um and now let's let's see what we're looking at here. So here's another problem. Basically, we we have this right effect coming on, and it's on Lee, the with of that, the main stroke. There s o it. It's not gonna fill the entire a because they, um it's just not enough area for it. So if we if we turn them a if we turned out right later, back on and we look at how thick it is here and notice again. We have our outlines in place if we take our stroke path here and we change this with to be directly the with of the A Now, when we when we have our Alfa track mental on and we turn that off, it will actually be the entire A. So let's go ahead and look back at that. And that looks pretty nice. So again, that's that. That's a little bit slow. Overall, we're gonna use we can use, um, adjustment there. Um, if we if we look at everything here, I think this this stroke can come on a little bit faster and then these can move up. And the reason why is because once once we get our all of our multiple effects going on, we kind of we don't want things to happen too slowly. We want it also kind of layer within, so that everything's done it in a timely manner. So again, now that we have that in place, we can choose again. Teoh pre compose this. This could be our main are a main layer, so let's go ahead and do that. And now that that is within our computer, um, let's go ahead and in our project, stay organized and, uh, create are a project folder. So now that separated there and again, let's go ahead and duplicating these. So now we hate we can get our three colors back in a place so there are a is already using the the sea foam green color. But we need to go ahead and let's go back into our Let's go back into our in overall comp and let's get those those Phil effects and with copy him over. So again, that's why it's really important toe kind of set everything up in organized manner so that you can keep reusing assets that you've created previously. It's gonna make your life a lot easier. So now that's and that pink is in place. And then, um, again we can grab this this other yellow Phil and the exact same thing. So all we did was we pasted that that fill in a place and ah and Now we have the exact same animation that we had before, so you can see there's a little tear here that's happening, and we need to figure out why that's happening. We need to go back into our main animation and with our path animation here, Um, what's let's get in close and let's see why that is tearing. So it looks like what's happening is that the ah, these two points are not actually sitting directly in the same spot you can see like once when we have this sitting here, you see how it's It's wider at first and then it's in its supposedly in the right spot here . But then it z wider here, so we need to go ahead and snap that in a place. So now that they're both sitting in the same spot, and we shouldn't have our tear their happen anymore, Okay, so let's go ahead and zoom back and let's see if that if that is the case of that work, yeah, so now we don't have that tear happening anymore. So that's why the guide is the guide layer is pretty important so that we can get that all of our points on the exact same plane s so that we don't have any clipping or anything like that happening. Okay, so let's go back into our A in emission layer. Our animation pre come. And I really have that going. It looks pretty interesting. I think I think for this style, we almost we don't want them. Teoh fully animate out without touching each other. So I think by that'll pro are feeling that cascading effect is what we want to happen. Um, so that looks pretty interesting. Let's go ahead and play that back and see how that looks. Yeah, it looks pretty fun. Okay, so now that we have all of our strokes and everything from the original in layer, um, it could be pretty cool. Teoh, just go ahead and we actually we only need one of these. Um, What's going to turn his back on? And with our outline here, let's hit you twice on the keyboard. Um, let's take these two paths here, copied them, and then the stroke right on layer here. All right, so if you select this him, that's the content. Eso if you hit paste paste, both of our outlines in a place and we just need to stack them above this stroke, um, and then go ahead and elite this part. Okay, and nothing is happening. It's disappeared. Now The reason why is because whenever we set up our pre comp the stroke and the transforms and all that stuff, all of that's different. So, um, quick, there's not really a quick explanation of it, other than what we need to do is we need to take the transforms of this outline the A outline, copied the position and then paste it over to our new right on and there it pops in directly in the place. That's just the way that the smart pre composer and the explode shape players basically work together to, um, toe adjust all the transformers and knew all of that. So we just need to make sure that that pops right in a place where it's supposed to. So and we can We can go ahead and pace that over to our secondary right on, because we're gonna want to do the exact same thing. We take these a and a two layers and let's copy them. Ah, you select in and place him in a place and go ahead and believe that in now. Okay, so with this one here we have all the animations that we had in place before. Except the stroke is happening in the wrong spot. So we'll just take that and again, find the path and you can move the path as a whole and just kind of snap it to that center . And that works. Right? So there we go. So where were able Teoh? Use all of our existing animations that we had before and just kind of copy what we needed to in place. And let's turn this main outline off and there we go. We have a fully functioning animated letter. Um, we kind of need to adjust a little bit timing. I feel like the A is going still going a little bit slow. Um, so you might want to tweet that. It's all according to taste. So, um, but that should be it. So let's turn. Our guys often watch our little animate a letter, and that's basically it. Now, from here, I'm not going to show you how to animate any more letters. That's gonna be completely up to you to decide how you want to animate your letters. You've got all the tools that you need in your tool bag. All you need to do is is do what we did here, where we either use the right on effect to write our tablet in place. Or we can animate the actual paths of the individual shape layers to make this little a grow on happen. Eso that's kind of up to you. You can figure out how you want to do different paths and all sorts of different stuff. It works with curve pass if you have a B or anything like that, so I'll leave all that up to you Now in our next lesson, we're going to have all of our individual and made it letters done. And we just have this animating on. So I'll put him in a place and I'll show you how Teoh get a cool animation off in all sorts of different things. Um, once we get all of our letters done. All right, I'll see you in the next lesson. 9. Creating Looping Animations with Time Remapping: all right. Now that we have all of our letters animated, we're going to be putting them back into the timeline and using the time remap tool in order to animate them in and out and adjust the timing a little bit. And we're gonna create a looping animation. So let's go back and aftereffects now. Ah, I went ahead and I left. Ah, lefties where we only have the m and a cause. What's gonna happen with you guys is whatever letters that you have that are duplicated, you're going to see them. You're going to see one of the letter that you choose to animate to be the correct animation. And then the secondary letter eyes either gonna be like, hopefully you didn't delete it. Um, but it's gonna be missing from this comp, and basically, this is going to be your opportunity. Teoh, swap all these letters. And so the way to do that is if I take, I take my, uh, my layer here and slept the oh, I can actually select all of the O's that air in the comp go over to our project pallet, where I have my final water animation and hold Ault while you drag into the timeline. And actually, it will replace those those with the animated ones. So, um, that's great. That's what we need. And basically, you just want to do that for all of your letters. So will the head and all drag in for the I and this Pretty boring. So I'm just gonna speed this up. Okay? Now they're all gone because we're at the start of the timeline and they need to animate on . So we have them all animated in the place, and that's all they do. So what we're going to do and let's let's talk about a couple of these different animations so we can see what's going on here. So we have our stroke right on that we were doing before. Um, let's go ahead and previous timeline. Better well, in Teoh just the length of the animation. So we have our stroke right on here. We've got another stroke right on. Um, for the zero there or for the Oh, we're doing it. We're doing a little bit of fun stuff with the tea here where we animate the main structure . Come on. And then the T flips itself and it's got a little bit of overlap to the animation there, so that's pretty fun. Um, but basically, this is this is all the exact same that we, uh we just went through. And I understood each individual letter. That s is ah, it's pretty simple to do. Um, so now that we have all that set up Ah, all we need to do in order to offset this animation is Let's go ahead and add time remapping to the layer. So if you right click the layer, go to time and then enable time remapping, that is control T. Now we have time. Remapping all in our layer doesn't do anything until you create key frames. So let's go ahead. And at the end of the M, let's go ahead and solo this letter at the end of the M animation, which is right there. Let's let's go ahead and go to two seconds because that's when everything ins and let's let's add a key there. And the easiest thing to do is just go ahead and delete this one. This key frame that set on the end, delete that off. And so now we have our M animating on. And if we select these key frames and just go a little bit past the timeline, copy them paste control C control the command. See? Come in. Via if you're on a Mac. Ah, it's doing these excellent thing, but we need Teoh with these key frame selected Go to key frame assistant and time reverse key frames. So now we have it animate on and sits for a second and then it limits off So and I've adjusted. I've adjusted my timeline settings Com setting tear Teoh five seconds. You just go to command K on set the duration to five seconds there and hit. Ok, um So now our whole animation here is happening over five seconds. Does it? Inmates on and off. And I think if it's animating off, I think it needs to be a little bit faster than the animate on are also gets a little bit boring. So for our purposes, we're just gonna have it and made on and then off pretty quickly. So So let's go ahead. And all you have to do is copy those time, remount key friends altogether and paste them if you select all of our layers, paste them all at once and they're ready to go. So know everything. If we on solo, everything will animate on and off. So that's pretty cool. All we have to do to offset our animation is to take these key frames and shift the layers so that they're slightly different now. I think what we need to do is loop them within with the overlapping loop to. So so we'll do is we'll select. I like to select down and just kind of a shift when we need. Let's go ahead and just shift him over one from each. Now, if if you find this painful to move all of these layers over individually like this because it is, there's another script that I use all the time on, uh, a scripts dot com. It's called the rift, and it'll do all this for you should look that up a swell, Um, it is pretty awesome. So they were going, since we only had 13 letters toe 13 layers to work with. So it wasn't that big of a deal for us to do that. So now we just We have it offset so they, uh, they write on individually and so offset in time, it looks pretty nice. So now we we need to do to make this a better looping animation. We want to have them overlap a little bit. So we will select all of our layers here duplicate and let's go ahead and pull him. Ah, bluff. And we will just offset the timing so that right after you can see right after it goes off for the M here, we want the next M to come on. So if we just move that over all the way accordingly there, um, that should offset our timing there. So that's pretty cool. And you can see where this where this key frame is taking place. Uh, is thief frame right before the last key from there. So let's go to you are him. And, uh, if you notice right before the last keeper, that's the same as the you first frame here. So in order to get this to loop seamlessly, we just need to go one frame forward. So that'll be framed three seconds and 13 frames and hit in on the keyboard. That'll reset our work comp area. And now this will be a seamless loop. Ah, as it writes on and then writes often and writes back on. All right, so, uh, let's scroll back a little bit here and look at our animation, and we have a seamlessly looping sequence for our manner. So in our next lesson, it's gonna be the optional lesson where I use particular to create those cool particle effects. If you don't own particular, you can just skipped that lesson. And I will move on to a finishing lesson where we get a little bit more. Look to this on, then export and, uh, turned into an animated GIF so that you can put it on your website, so I will see you in the next lesson. 10. Experimenting with Particle Looks (Optional Step): this lesson is an optional lesson for those with trap code particular and want wanting to create a simple particle look. If you're new to trap code particular, it should be pretty easy, but we will move forward. All right, let's go into aftereffects, and I'm I have left off exactly where we left off here with our pre animated comp. So what will want to do is let's go ahead and trim that work area to the cops eyes because we only need this looping part and let's set up a new company using that existing one. So we'll want to do is go into your project panel. Take your animated banner here, Um uh, drag it directly to the new composition button. And what that does is it creates a new comp with the exact same settings, and it has the previous comp structured within that. So let's go ahead and rename this are, uh, our particle look and let's move forward. So basically we will. We're going to use the existing colors and stuff that we see here. Ah Teoh, create these particles eso first, let's go ahead and create a white little particle for us to intimate with the way I do that is, I just created a new car and let's do this. Ah, 100 by 100. And let's call this our particle pop and three seconds this fine. It doesn't really matter. We're gonna trim it in their eso within here. We'll want to grab the Ellipse tool and double click, and this creates a circle inside the camp. And as you can see, we've got all sorts of funky settings going on a circle. The stroke is actually really large because of our trimming that we were doing before. So let's go ahead and turn that stroke off and let's turn a fill layer on and double hit you twice on the keyboard. And let's just go ahead and make this white okay. And the simplest way to do this is to take the stroke with not the stroke with Sorry, let's delete the stroke. The simplest way to do this is to scroll down in the Ellipse path here, and with the size of the Ellipse, will want Kate create a key frame. So let's go Teoh, just just before ah, second, let's do like 20 frames and create a key frame for the scale. Go back to the Senate or back to the start and hit zero on the sides. Ah, so this is going to scale up like this and let's go ahead and create are easing Eazy e's and then grab this. I think, uh, this would actually look more interesting if the it didn't ease out from the start. It kind of just pops on, but then has a lot of easing on the end of it. So you'll see you are so it's kind of interesting as I like, really eases in the place. And then we take this ellipse path and duplicate controlled deep. And, uh, with that in place, if you go to the center here, if you switch this to reverse the path direction, you'll see that it actually takes out that particle or it takes out that circle. So, uh, if if we offset this animation, we create a little ring. So, uh, I like to do this a lot. It's a really fast way to just make a little circle pop. And if we hit in on their again and just trim this cop Ah, there we go. We've got a little particle pop. All right, so let's ah, let's go back to our particle look. And, um, if we bring, we want to bring in this park. Will pop comp in here, uh, set up there and then we'll create a new solid that is control. Why? And let's call this particular and say OK, and under our effects and presets, let's type about particular. And let's add that to are solid and the first time you had particular, it just creates a particle system for you. Does whatever I want. Um, it's not very interesting. Eso Let's fix that. Under the affects control setting, it's going move that down a little bit. Well, scroll this over so that we can see more. We want to start with our changing our emitter. So selecting our banner here and we want Teoh. Make sure that it is set as a three D layer. Particular works with three D layers, especially if you're trying to use it as an emitter, which we are. So now this emitter type is set the point, and as you can see, it's it's coming out of that center There. It's it's position X wise here and if we set that to a layer instead, it's not gonna. Particles are gonna come from anywhere. Um, and that's because we need to go to our layer emitting setting under the mirror tab and select our animated banner as our partner. So, as you can see, the RGB is automatically set arm to be the part, the particle color, which is what we want because we want our existing colors to kind of pop out there and you can see it's creating these little particles. Um, so the built in particles are very interesting. Let's go ahead and let's close the emitter For now. Open up the particle tab and let's let's set this to Sprite and go to our texture again and nothing is going to show up. So we need to select our particle pop texture, and now we have these particles at a proper known Now they only play once because we have the time sampling set up to current time. So we need to do is set this to start at birth and play once. So add birth. They're going Teoh emulate on and then they're going to you play and they're going crazy. All over the place, so let's get a little bit more organized here. Um, one thing that I did for this look is I set up the mission velocity to be pretty high. Um, let's do like 500 for starts and Lynn. Let's go to ur physics to create a more interesting look. Eso will go Teoh, our air physics and the air resistance. Let's go ahead and turn up okay and you'll see what's happening here. That is wrong, eyes that they are emitting from everywhere, and we only want them to admit from the actual text that's writing on. And the reason why they're admitting from everywhere is because if we go into her animated better, we have a solid that's actually covering the background. So let's go ahead and let's remove that. Let's hit control X and let's let's just cut it out of place. So if we see now, we have transparency set up, and basically we we only want to see that if we're admitting it. So we go back to our particle look and now they're only coming from that center, and we can see now that the ah, the particle pop is coming through because the the background is no honor covering that. So let's go ahead and just turn that layer off. You don't actually need it on in order the particles to admit and you could see now they're only coming from our from our animated type. So let's go ahead and hit control V. Since we cut that background color and now it's back in a place. Okay, So sorry for that mistake. I missed a step there. Um, but that's why we do these things so that we in trouble shoot quickly. And, uh, no, we're looking at so from here, uh, all we're all we're gonna do is we We have that velocity set up and let's go ahead and go back to our particular and set up the physics. We want the air resistance to be quite high that way. What that's doing is that as there as these particles, you're admitting they're stopping because the air in the atmosphere of the system is ah is stopping them in place. So So this creates, like, kind of a fun look where we can set up the emitters velocity to be a little bit higher, and then they kind of they, like, pop out and then they stop in a place, so that's kind of fun. It's like little, well, fireworks, like happening. So, as you can see because of, Ah, there's not a whole lot of information for the emitter to actually admit from at any point in time. So we need to up our particles per second. Let's go ahead and just let's turn that toe like three times as much. UM, 300. And yeah, that's a lot more interesting now as those air popping in a place. It's pretty fun, and that's pretty much it. We can stop here, but we can actually let's move on a little bit further and go into the back into the particle settings and under the size. Let's go ahead and set the size to random amount, and this is a percentage based, so let's go with, like, 75% that way. Our particles have slightly different sizes, and there's a little bit more interesting, and let's let's make him a little bit larger. Overall Tournament six. So that's kind of fun there. So as you can see, we have a little bit of clipping kind of coming out and some of our spots. So let's go ahead and make sure that are under our physics. The air resistance is set pretty high so that the particles don't get away too far. There just kind of pumping in a place and coming out, so that way they don't clip off the side of our banner. We don't want that to happen, so that's pretty fun. And from here, the another thing that we can add is a slight bit of movement through a turbulence field. If you carry that down, you got all sorts of turbulent options I'm not gonna get too far into. But if you just want to affect the position a little bit, you can see as you do that they kind of move a little bit. It's going like 90 and now they have a little bit of drift on them after they're stopped from the air resistance. So that makes that kind of boring in a mission a little bit more interesting as they're popping in a place and drifting a little bit and that's pretty much all I did for the look . So overall it's a pretty simple set up all we did was we set up a layer emitter through the middle tab here. We haven't admitting from our banner, and we're making sure that the dinner has Alfa. And then we're Ah, we're setting up our particle to be a Sprite, which we created through that particle pop. And then it's creates doing all the other work for us. We have, ah, using the RGB of the emitter. So it's getting some of those color aspects and it looks pretty nice. Okay, In our next lesson, we're gonna finish out our look of the animation and go ahead and learn how to export this Azaz an animated video file, and turned into an animated GIF. Thank you very much and I will see you on the next lesson. 11. Finalizing and Exporting your Animations: in this next lesson, we're going to be finalizing our animation and getting ready for export. We're going to learn how to set up some export settings. That'll get us a nice video in order to bring into Photoshopped and create an animated GIF out off. So let's go ahead and open up aftereffects one more time. And from here, um, this is showing the particle Ah, animation that we did before. And if you skip that section, that's okay. We're going to go ahead and finalize this look overall and get ready for export. So if we ah, with whatever final animation, like if you're still just in this animated banner, um, composition and that's where everything is, that's perfectly fine. But I'm gonna go ahead and finalize the look in here. One thing that that the reason why our color, uh, our color controller is so important is because I'm not really feeling the way this is looking for motion addicts. This is more of the look that I had for my portfolio site with this color scheme. So let's let's make amore motion addicts look for here. So I have my background color here. I can hit control shift. Why and that'll pull up the solid settings there. I need a light gray from a motion attics. Look, Um, and I won't get into details there, but obviously that's not really working for the rest of the colors, because this is just doesn't look very great on there. So let's go back into our our color palette layer, and we'll go ahead and just the colors from there. And so, if you if you pull us to the siding in and then open apart our final look here, if you want, you can actually lock of the composition settings here, and this will allow you to adjust the color. Oh, are it allows you to adjust another layer and still show that as a preview. So now I don't think that I like how it's inning on the green there. And let's go ahead and make it more of, ah white overall. And so now it's finishing are white, and I think that would be cool if it if it still had that, um, like a green issue to it from the beginning. Yeah, and then maybe two more golden yellow, which I have motion at its colors, but I think this thistle worked fine for that of raw. So now that we've changed our colors through our cool color controllers, how we set up in the beginning, we don't have to go through all of our individual letter cops in order to get that to work , which is pretty awesome. So let's go ahead and close that. And now that we have our final colors that I like here, let's go ahead. Let's go ahead and add one more little effect that I added to the final of the motion, not x one, and it's just a little drop shadow, but it looks kind of nice if you go over here and typing and drop space shadow. Ah, and then the throwing down onto the animated banner here it pops up right in the place and let's go ahead and set the distance a little bit further out. And let's set the A pass ity pretty low. Maybe like 2025% maybe a little bit higher than that, Like 35. That looks comical. And then all I did to get that little extra animation going is let's go to zero here and uh , what set a key frame there and to the end and let's put the cycle at told one total. We'll see what that looks like so as you can see it shifting the animations around and so that's a fun little drop Shadow looks. And so everything else is kind of hard, and, uh, and that looks pretty good. But actually, let's go ahead and just that key frame and let's make it a two instead of a one to get it to move a little bit faster. And let's go ahead and make sure that that happens right at the cut serve at, um, as its animating through, it'll finish up. So, yeah, that's moving pretty nice. Like how that looks overall. So now that we have that set up, let's go ahead and get our exports sending script. Okay, so all we need to do to render this file is Thio added to our render queue. The easiest way to do that is with the cops selected, hold control shift or command shift. If you're on Apple wagon and hit the forward bracket, Um, that's going to add directly to the arena. Q. So let's go ahead and delete out the other ones here. We don't need them. And ah, from here Ah, we need to do is adjust our render settings. The best settings there are fine. And let's go ahead and turn this to a quick time file. Ah, animation format is fine with us, So if you need to adjust that it's right in here and quality 100%. This is gonna be a fairly large file. Um, but it's not too big because it's it's a pretty short comp overall, and ah, there's not a whole lot of colors to it. So let's go ahead and hit. OK, um, and if you like, I tend to save things. Presets, Uh, go ahead and make a template for that. Here's my key T and M 100 Pre said. That's the animation Kotick. So let's go ahead and save that out. Just click here and that's gonna be we need to navigate to our folder. But I'm gonna go ahead and put that in the well, there, there, and let's name it whatever we like. But let's call this the motion addicts look for emotion addicts loop excellent, and let's go ahead and save that. And Ah, I typically save the file, but I'm working in before hit render. Ah, and then we're going to render it out, and that's a wonderful sound. So, uh, in the next tutorial, I'll show you how Teoh, turn that video file into an animated GIF and we are good to go. I will see you there. 12. Converting a Video File to an Animated .gif: Okay, so for this final lesson, you should already have your animated file out. Put it as a dot in movie and we're going to take it into photo shop and convert it to an animated GIF format so we can use it on the Internet. So let's go ahead and open up our folder where we have our file and open up photo shop and just go ahead and drag that directly into Photoshopped. And as you can see, I have the timeline window open. If you don't have that open, it's just under the window here and set up timeline and so we can scrub through and our animation is directly there. And now for this scale, I think it might be a little bit too large of a format for our banner ad. So let's go ahead and resize. How to do that is just go to image here, the image size and let's go ahead and resize that to 800 wide and say OK, now, a problem that you will find whenever you do that is there is a small little pixel of transparency that happens around the edge, and it's it's more parents. The smaller, you scale down. But it is there, I promise you. So the way to fix that is Teoh. Go ahead and create a new layer and throw it underneath and you'll see in the timeline here . It's actually not under the the moving timeline yet. So we need to move it under there and you need to zoom back slightly and let's go ahead and scale it to the exact same. So it doesn't change the length of the animation. So that's the fix there. And just take that and what I dropped the color of our background here and go ahead and hits ultimate elite and that will fill that toe layer with that color so we no longer have the little pixel that's off. So to export this as a Jiff, let's just go to file and safer Web control. Shift s again, Another hot key for you. And, uh, here are settings here. Ah, we need to do so. We need to make sure that this is looping forever because we don't ever want our animation to stop. And right now this preset that we have is 256 colors. I do a selective mode for the color. We have the diffusion set up here, and we can look more into that later. But for this look, since it's all solid colors, we don't actually have to really adjust a whole lot. It still looks nice and crisp. It's only when you start getting into radiance and, uh, and multiple a lot of multiple colors that you're gonna have to adjust some of these settings to get a better look out of it. But since this is all solid colors and animation looks great and let's go ahead and save that as a Jiff. So I have that in the final directory, and this is emotion. Attics Loop is going to say that, and when we navigate to that directory and open that up and there is our animated GIF, so go ahead and upload that to the class in, and I will see all of your animated GIFs feel free to while in the work in progress stage of getting individual letters done, feel free to export those individually and make little gifts of them, and that way we can critique them and see where we want to add extra animation and that should be it. So thank you very much for joining me. I will have one final video to sound off. 13. Final Thoughts : I would like to thank everybody for taking the time to go through my tutorial. Hopefully, you learned a little bit about how shape laters, animate inside after effects. And hopefully the workflow tips definitely helped you out in getting everything organized and streamline. I'm sorry that I wasn't able to show everything that shape layer is offer. But through experimentation, I think that you can figure things out for your own, and I definitely encourage you to do so. So thank you so much again for taking the time to take my class. Well, I really look forward to seeing everybody's animations, including Working progresses. If you have any questions, feel free to leave a comment, and for now, I will see you in the next tutorial.